Spooky Season Approaches, with First Trailer for V/H/S/Halloween

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The Halloween season is creeping over the horizon like a ghoul drawn to the scent of human flesh, and with it comes the ever-present certainty that horror streamer Shudder is probably about to release another V/H/S entry on the world. Since first successfully relaunching the series in 2021 with V/H/S/94, it’s become quite a successful little pocket franchise for the AMC-owned streamer, with yearly releases dropping like clockwork. With that said, it’s fair to question how much novelty or staying power there really is in the handheld found footage horror premise at this point, and some of the entries have dwindled a bit as they regurgitate past highlights in particular. But rather than anchoring itself to a particular time period, last year’s entry V/H/S/Beyond took the more novel approach of slightly altering genre, focusing entirely on sci-fi horror stories, no doubt in an attempt to keep the annual franchise as fresh as it can be. This year’s upcoming V/H/S/Halloween, on the other hand, arguably looks a bit more obviously inspired: Halloween horror! Who would have thought of that? The first trailer released today can be viewed below, but the one-sentence synopsis is as follows: “A collection of Halloween-themed videotapes unleashes a series of twisted, blood-soaked tales, turning trick-or-treat into a struggle for survival.”

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Somehow, we get the feeling that this will be one of those V/H/S entries without much effort made toward the connective tissue of a framing story, and more a floating, free-form anthology. Regardless, which is typically most important in any given V/H/S entry is the filmmakers involved. V/H/S/Halloween will feature segments from the following: Bryan M. Ferguson, Casper Kelly, Micheline Pitt-Norman and R.H. Norman, Alex Ross Perry, Paco Plaza and Anna Zlokovic. There are some interesting inclusions there, particularly Her Smell and Pavements director Perry, Too Many Cooks creator Kelly, and Plaza, who created one of the touchstones of found footage horror’s first big wave with 2007’s Spanish language REC.

As for the trailer itself, it’s a little tough to glean any true details from what is effectively a montage of shaky-cam mayhem, but that’s par for the course when it comes to this series. Let’s hope it can capture a bit of the nostalgic holiday glee found in something like 2013’s WNUF Halloween Special, which you can also coincidentally enough find on Shudder. V/H/S/Halloween hits the streamer on Oct. 3, 2025.